The war in Iraq has made the Atlantic seem wider. But really it has had the
effect of a magnifying glass, bringing older and more fundamental differences
between Europe and the United States into focus.

These growing divisions -- over war, peace, religion, sex, life and death
-- amount to a philosophical dispute about the common origins of European
and American civilization. Both children of the Enlightenment, the United
States and Europe clearly differ about the nature of this inheritance and
about who is its better custodian.

Start with religion. The United States is experiencing a revival of the Christian
faith in many areas of civic and political life, while in Europe the process
of secularization continues unabated. Today the United States is the most
religious-minded society of the Western democracies. In a 2003 Harris poll
79 percent of Americans said they believed in God, and more than a third said
they attended a religious service once a month or more. Numerous polls have
shown that these figures are much lower in Western Europe. In the United States
a majority of respondents in recent years told pollsters that they believed
in angels, while in Europe the issue was apparently considered so preposterous
that no one even asked the question.

When American commentators warn about a new fundamentalism, they generally
mention only the Islamic one. European intellectuals include two other kinds:
the Jewish and Christian variants.

Terms that President Bush has used, like "crusade" and "axis
of evil," and Manichaean exclusions like his observation that anyone
who is not on our side is on the side of the terrorists, reveal the assumption
of a religious mantle by a secular power, which in Europe has become unthinkable.
Was it not, perhaps, this same sense of religious infallibility that seduced
senior members of the Bush administration into leading their country into
a war with Iraq on the basis of information that has turned out to be false?

Another reason for Europe's alienation from the United States is harder to
define, but for want of a better term, I call it American narcissism.

When American troops in Iraq mistakenly shoot an Arab journalist or reduce
half of a village to rubble in response to the explosion of a roadside bomb,
there will inevitably be a backlash. Only a fool would maintain that an occupying
power could afford many such mistakes, even if it is under constant threat
of suicide attacks. The success of an occupation policy -- however temporary
it is meant to be -- depends on the occupier's ability to convince the population,
by means of symbolic and material gestures, that it is prepared to admit to
mistakes.

In its use of the language of power the Bush administration has created
the opposite impression, and not just in Iraq. The United States apparently
cannot be wrong about anything, nor does it have to apologize to anybody.
In many parts of the world people have come to believe, fairly or not, that
Americans regard the life of their countrymen as infinitely more valuable
than the lives of any other of the earth's inhabitants.

Of course, even in Europe only a pacifist minority denies the existence of
necessary, unavoidable, justified wars. The interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo
and Afghanistan were supported by many European nations, even if some took
a long time to make up their minds. European soldiers took part in those wars
and continue to play a part in the peacekeeping aftermath.

What arouses European suspicion, though, is the doctrine of just, preemptive
wars President Bush has outlined. Anyone who claims to be waging a preventive
war in the cause of justice is confusing either a particular or a partisan
interest with the interests of humanity. A president who makes such a claim
would be arrogating the right to be the ultimate arbiter of war and peace
and to stand in judgment over the world. From there it is but a short step
to dismissing a basic insight of the Enlightenment, namely that human judgment
and decisions are fallible by their very nature. This fallibility cannot be
annulled or ameliorated by any political, legal or religious authority. The
same argument goes for the death penalty.

Animosity isn't the only feature of the trans-Atlantic relationship. Europe
is rightly envious of America's multicultural society. There can be no doubt
that the United States has produced the world's most varied and integrative
culture, and it is no accident that it is the only one to have a worldwide
appeal.

But the American multicultural model also generates an illusion. Since Americans
really have come from all over the world, in the United States it is easy
to believe that you can know and understand the world without ever leaving
the country. Those who were born and brought up in America forget that these
people "from all over the world" first had to become Americans -- a condition
that new immigrants generally accept with enthusiasm -- before they could
celebrate their cultural otherness.

This is why it is always an American version of otherness that is encountered
in the United States. You will not necessarily learn anything about the culture
and history of Vietnam by working alongside a Vietnamese doctor in the teaching
hospital at Stanford. You can sit next to an Indian in the same dot.com company
in Los Angeles for years without learning much about the manners and customs
of India. And going to a French restaurant in Atlanta is no guarantee that
you will be served French cuisine.

Foreign films account for less than 1 percent of the American film market,
and the figures are similarly low for books and news from abroad.

The impressive integrative power of American society seems to generate a
kind of obliviousness to the world, a multicultural unilateralism. The result
is a paradox: a fantastically tolerant and flexible society that has absorbed
the whole world, yet has difficulty comprehending the world beyond its borders.

These differences and irritations add up to a substantial disagreement on
the joint origins of American and European civilization. Europeans think that
Americans are on their way to betraying some of the elementary tenets of the
Enlightenment, establishing a new principle in which they are "first
among unequals."

And Washington accuses Europe of shirking its international responsibilities,
and thus its own human rights inheritance. After all, what is the point of
international law if it prevents intervening in the affairs of a brutal regime
to stay the hand of a tyrant? Who is the true advocate of human rights: the
one who cites international law to justify standing by while genocide is being
committed or the one who puts an end to the genocide, even if it means violating
international law?

Unfortunately, we cannot expect the news media in the United States or Europe
to present a nuanced view of this dispute. In 20 years of traveling back and
forth between Germany and America I have become convinced that news broadcasts
usually confirm their audiences' views: in Europe, about America, the "cowboy
nation," and in the United States, about Europe, the "axis of weasels."

These disagreements will be influenced but cannot be resolved by the the
American presidential election in November. The divisions are too deep, and
Europe cannot meet the United States halfway on too many issues -- the separation
between church and state, the separation of powers, respect for international
law, the abolition of the death penalty -- without surrendering its version
of its Enlightenment inheritance.

On other contentious issues the United States feels as strongly: the universality
of human rights and the need to intervene -- if the United Nations is unable
to act -- when there is genocide or ethnic cleansing, or when states are failing.

So are we standing on the threshold of a new understanding or a new historic
divide, comparable to the evolutionary split that occurred when a group of
pioneer hominids thousands of years ago turned their backs forever on their
African homeland?

So far it has usually been the Americans who have had to remind the Europeans
of these common origins, which the Europeans, in turn, have so often betrayed.
Maybe this time it is up to the Europeans to remind the Americans of the promises
of the Enlightenment that the United States seems to have forgotten.

Peter Schneider is a German novelist and essayist. This article was translated
from the German by Victor Homola of The New York Times.